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VISIT OUR FACEBOOK PAGE

Swing by our Flying Lessons Facebook page for a daily stream of bird photos, avian news, comments and commentary from readers. Join almost 3000 other birders in “liking” the page to see the posts in your news stream.

Washington Post story on eBird

IN-DEPTH STORY ON BIRDING

Here’s a package that ran in the Washington Post on how Cornell’s eBird project grew into the world’s most ambitious citizen science project. It’s an example of the in-depth coverage we do from time to time as part of our reporting on avian topics and trends.

Can a bird sing with a banjo? Click this video to see.

Quotes for the birds

“The radical otherness of birds is integral to their beauty and their value. They are always among us but never of us. They’re the other world-dominating animals that evolution has produced, and their indifference to us ought to serve as a chastening reminder that we’re not the measure of all things.”

— Jonathan Franzen, novelist and renown birder from his National Geographic Magazine essay on the “Year of the Bird.”

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About us

We’re two journalists who’ve traded in our work in publishing and syndicated writing for following and photographing the birds. We live in Washington, DC, but are traveling the country every chance we get -- and are sharing the lessons birds are teaching us and the photos we take along the way.

Why Flying Lessons

This website is about what we can learn from the birds around us. Some of the lessons are obvious, such as the way birds can be a barometer of environmental changes. Others are subtle, like the way you, as an observer, have to adapt to navigate the world in which birds operate. We ourselves still have much to learn about birding, a late-in-life pursuit that has captivated us in retirement. But we decided to start writing about the lessons and teachings as we’re finding our way, in hopes that our storytelling and photography will help to celebrate a captivating element of nature.